Site Mobile Navigation

Pop Stars Join Growing Effort to Aid the Poor

Hugh Evans is organizing next month’s Global Festival in Central Park.Credit
Robert Caplin for The New York Times

If there is such a thing as a prodigy in the world of philanthropy, Hugh Evans fits the bill. At 14, after visiting a Manila slum with the Christian humanitarian group World Vision, he returned to his middle-class home outside Melbourne, Australia, and announced to his mother he wanted to dedicate his life to ending extreme poverty. She laughed.

He kept his word. While still a teenager he worked for a year at a South African orphanage. In college he started the Oaktree Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has raised millions for third-world schools and education programs. Then he helped lead a successful campaign to get Australia to double its foreign aid. That campaign kicked off in 2006 with the Make Poverty History Concert in Melbourne, which was designed to coincide with the G20 meeting of world financial leaders.

Now, at 29, Mr. Evans, the co-founder of the Global Poverty Project, is organizing a similar concert on the Great Lawn in Central Park on Sept. 29 to call attention to crippling poverty in developing countries, just as world leaders converge on New York for their annual session at the United Nations General Assembly. He hopes to build a movement among the expected 60,000 concertgoers that will pressure world leaders to commit an additional $500 million for reducing poverty and eradicating diseases like polio and malaria.

A benefit concert on that scale is a tall order for any nonprofit organizer, much less one working in a new country. Yet in the space of 18 months Mr. Evans and his team not only persuaded city officials to grant a permit for one of the park’s most hallowed spaces, but also persuaded executives at the concert promoter Goldenvoice to produce the show for no fee. And he cajoled several high-profile acts to donate their time: Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Foo Fighters, the Black Keys, Band of Horses and K’naan.

Pop concerts have long been used to urge the privileged to address the problems of the impoverished, going back to George Harrison’s 1971 concert to help refugees from Bangladesh and Bob Geldof’s 1985 Live Aid concert for victims of the Ethiopian famine. But the model for Mr. Evan’s event is the Live 8 concerts that Mr. Geldof organized two decades later to pressure industrialized nations to cancel third-world debt and increase foreign aid. Those concerts were aimed at getting governments to act, rather than at collecting money.

Mr. Evans and his organization face significant hurdles. For starters a worldwide downturn has put pressure on budgets everywhere, making politicians averse to spending more on good works abroad. And if history is a guide, it is difficult to transform excitement over a concert into a coherent social movement.

“Celebrities are great for calling attention to a cause, but then you have to follow up to generate continued support or other kinds of involvement, and that’s where these things usually fall short,” said Leslie Lenkowsky, a professor of philanthropic studies at Indiana University.

Photo

The 2006 Make Poverty History Concert, part of a campaign led by Mr. Evans to get Australia to double foreign aid.Credit
Kristian Dowling/Getty Images

Mr. Evans says the answer lies in harnessing the Internet and social media. And since the city required that 54,000 of the tickets be distributed free through a lottery, he is using the lure of tickets to generate support for the cause.

To get the free tickets to the show, Global Festival 2012, fans must sign up at globalcitizen.org and take some action, or at least what passes for action in the digital age. They get into the ticket lottery by watching videos about extreme poverty and disease around the world, posting information on social media, signing digital petitions or donating money to charities, among them Unicef and Rotary International. Mr. Evans said the intent is to “gamify the whole experience” and create a “sustainable movement.”

“Instead of people going to Ticketmaster,” he said, “they actually have to earn their way into the concert. It’s not just a one-off event. You are building a movement from the outset.”

More than 32,000 people have registered, and 7,000 of those have already received tickets.

Mr. Evans acknowledges that the concert will raise little money directly. The production costs are being underwritten by grants from philanthropic institutions like the Sumner M. Redstone Charitable Foundation and the Pratt Foundation. The organizers’ approach stands in contrast to last year’s Black Eyed Peas charity concert in the park. That event raised $4.8 million for the Robin Hood Foundation through the sale of 6,000 high-priced V.I.P. tickets.

The idea of using the concert to spur activism rather than raise money was a major selling point for the bands that signed on.

“I’ve never heard of anything like it really,” said Patrick Carney, the Black Keys’ drummer. “It seems appropriate. Money doesn’t go a super long way, most of the time. If we were to sell tickets to this thing, I don’t know what that will accomplish, but getting 60,000 people aware of the organization, being involved in some way, is more valuable than generating a couple million dollars.”

Asking the audience to take action before the concert even started also appealed to Neil Young, who has a long history of social activism, his manager, Elliot Roberts, said.

“We get asked to do a lot of things for a lot of various reasons,” he said. “This one just feels like it was going to go past the event. That the event was the starting point.”

In conversation Mr. Evans comes across a true believer, a churchgoing crusader who is sometimes earnest to a fault and has tendency to slip into speechmaking. Asked why he and his new wife decided to move to New York City two years ago when neither of them had ties to the United States, he said, as if stating the obvious, “America has a critical place to play in the end of extreme poverty.”

Photo

Patrick Carney of the Black Keys, part of the free show scheduled for Sept. 29.Credit
Evan Agostini/Associated Press

A few minutes later he bristled at the suggestion that he was asking people to take a political stand on foreign aid to get tickets to a public event. “This transcends politics,” he said.

Putting together the concert has required every ounce of Mr. Evan’s considerable skills as a fund-raiser and organizer. The original idea for the Central Park concert was not his, but came from Ryan Gall, who founded the HOPE Campaign, a California group that raises money for projects in East Africa through the sale of albums and art. They met during a conference at Columbia University and agreed to work together.

The first step was persuading Bill Fold, a partner in Goldenvoice, a division of AEG Live, to back the project, Mr. Evans said.

“When I met him in person, I was instantly sold,” Mr. Fold, 43, said. “He’s got a charisma, transparent and genuine. I’m pretty mesmerized by what he’s done at such a young age.”

Mr. Fold brought in three veteran rock promoters in his company — Brian Murphy, Rick Mueller and Mark Shulman — who had influence with bands and knew how to navigate the city’s permit process. While they set up meetings with band managers and city officials, Mr. Evans reached out to the artists through other channels, activating a network of celebrity supporters and sending emissaries to make entreaties.

Mr. Murphy said it became easier to persuade the musicians to sign on once Mr. Evans obtained permission in March to use Central Park. But in the end it was Mr. Evans’s rhetorical skills that won over the band’s managers. “He just bleeds the cause, like it is his sole being,” Mr. Murphy said.

Foo Fighters was the first major band to sign on, after Mr. Evans and Mr. Gall made a face-to-face appeal to the group’s manager, John Silva, in Los Angeles last year.

“I think we caught him on a great day,” Mr. Gall said. “He did say the Foos have very few places on their bucket list to play, and Central Park is one of them.”

In May the Black Keys agreed to do the event after one of Mr. Evan’s supporters, the supermodel Erin Heatherton, lobbied Mr. Carney, the drummer, whom she knew socially. Mr. Young and his band Crazy Horse were the last piece of the puzzle to fall in place, agreeing in July, Mr. Evans said.

“There were definitely times when you think to yourself, ‘How on earth are we going to pull this off?’ ” he said. “It’s not because people don’t have good will. They do have good will. It’s the fact you are juggling hundreds of different elements simultaneously.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 23, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Pop Stars Join Growing Effort To Aid the Poor. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe